How To Make a Powerful AIDS Doc: Talking to the Team Behind 'How To Survive a Plague'

This weekend in New York, "How To Survive a Plague" comes home. Two months after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival to intense acclaim, the film will screen as part of the 41st edition of New Directors/New Films.

This weekend in New York, "How To Survive a Plague" comes home. Two months after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival to intense acclaim, the film will screen as part of the 41st edition of New Directors/New Films.

A chronicle of AIDS activism in New York, the film shows how a group of men and women fought against a homophobic establishment to help bring life-saving drugs to America. It's a remarkable part of American history that too few are aware of, and one that comes to New York almost exactly 25 years after ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) -- the activist group at the core of "Plague" -- held its first demonstration.

Shortly after the film's world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Indiewire sat down with three New Yorkers pivotal to the film's existence: Director David France, producer Howard Gertler and Peter Staley -- one of the primary protagonists in the film's narrative.

A longtime journalist, "Plague" is France's first foray into filmmaking but he began covering AIDS "before it was even called AIDS." After starting in the gay presses he moved into the mainstream, working for The New York Times and New York magazine, among others.

He started making "Plague" roughly three years ago. It came largely out of a growing concern that all the writing and film work and thinking about AIDS all took place before AIDS activism started.

"If the plague years can be divided in half," he said. "The first half is 1981-1986 or so, and that's where so much work came from. That's where 'The Normal Heart' is. That's where 'Angels in America' is. That's where 'And The Band Played On' is. It's all about this mystery disease coming and killing us."

As France explains, the second half of the "plague years" was about response and how activists combated the crisis. But very little media has depicted this story. Why?

"I think the reason is that is when the good drugs came in 1996, AIDS suddenly became a non-story," France said. "Newspapers stopped writing about it. It was over. And the idea and going back and revisiting that was made impossible by media empires."

"How To Survive A Plague."

France decided to make the impossible possible, starting by writing a script and then seeking out the footage that told that story. He discovered a remarkable amount of video and film -- some 700 hours of useable footage (and thousands of hours more that they couldn't use ) -- and started crafting what would become "How To Survive a Plague."

After some intial work, France teamed up with Gertler, who had previously produced John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus" and Bobcat Goldthwait's "World's Greatest Dad," but this was his first documentary. Gertler said he had two strong thoughts when France presented his footage.

"The first was that this is footage is like gold, and this movie has to be made," he said. "And the second was that I couldn't believe I didn't know this story. For me, I realized that I'm a gay man in his mid-thirties living in New York who didn't know this story. And that there's a whole lot of other people out there who didn't know it either who need to know it."

'The gay community kind of pushed away and didn't want to revisit that era either,' said Peter Staley. 'But now's the time.'

Someone who most certainly knew it was Peter Staley, who came to New York in 1983 when he was hired by JP Morgan as a bond trader. He found out he was HIV positive two years later, but at the time he did not know any other HIV-positive people -- until he discovered ACT UP. On his way to work, Staley was handed a flyer for one of ACT UP's very first protests, which was occuring on Wall Street. The protests caused an uproar at Staley's work and he vividly remembered his mentor saying to him: "Everyone with AIDS deserved to die because they took it up the butt."

Completely in the closet, Staley said nothing. But when he went home that night, the protest was the lead story on the news and Staley decided that was "power he wanted to be involved with." So he attended the next meeting and from that point forward was a key player in ACT UP's mission.

A consistent presence in "Plague" both through stirring archival footage (Staley's powerful protest speeches should not leave a dry eye in the house) and in contemporary interviews, Staley also noted it wasn't just the media that refused to look back.

"The gay community kind of pushed away and didn't want to revisit that era either," he explained. "Even AIDS activists that continued working on this rarely went back there emotionally. There was a layer of pain involved that made everybody avoid it. And I think that's one of the primary reasons there hasn't been any retrospective look back on that period. But now's the time."

Almost exactly 25 years after Staley took that flyer on Wall Street, New Yorkers can make good on his suggestion and discover a story critical to their history. "How To Survive a Plague" screens as part of New Directors/New Films this Saturday, March 24th at the Film Society fo Lincoln Center, and then again March 26th at MoMA. Sundance Selects has acquired it for theatrical release this fall.